Earlier this month, Janet Raloff, a reporter at Science News, took a National Science Foundation-sponsored trip to Antarctica, a rite of passage for American science writers. It's not a cheap trip. NSF covers the costs in Antarctica, but reporters have to get a medical checkup before they leave, and they have to get to New Zealand to pick up the NSF plane. For many writers, these costs have been covered by their employers.
The idea that a source–in this case NSF–would pay for part of a reporter's trip is normally anathema, but the logistics of this are complicated, and so many reporters have now taken the trip, over so many decades, that questions about the NSF involvement are moot.
But while Raloff followed in the footsteps of many other reporters, something was different about her trip. To cover the costs of the trip, and the costs of editing, photography, and hiring replacements while she was traveling, she went to the crowd-funding site Kickstarter and asked for $15,000 from the public. "Our nonprofit is seeking support for the reporting of a journalistic expedition to Antarctica that aims to educate and enlighten young people and adults about the research going on in one of the world’s most fragile and remote ecosystems," the Kickstarter solicitation began. Those who pledged at certain levels got rewards (such as a year's digital subscription for $150). The appeal stressed the educational component of the project.
Raloff raised exactly $15,001.
Raloff is a good reporter, and I'm sure her stories for Science News and for Science News for Kids will be worth the money, however you want to try to calculate that. (You can find one story from the trip here and a post written while she was enroute here.)
But this experiment raises an interesting question: Is this a good model for journalism? Should players like Science News step aside and let freelancers and others with smaller budgets take advantage of Kickstarter? Or is this simply a bad idea?
I'm not sure what I think. Science News is published by Society for Science & the Public, a non-profit with annual revenue of about $19 million, according to Mike Mills, its chief content officer. Mills told me that paying for the trip would have taken funding away from other reporting trips, such as sending reporters to scientific meetings. The magazine's annual budget for travel is approximately $80,000, he said. The Antarctica trip would have taken a big bite out of that.
It's hard to argue that the Kickstarter funding compromises the reporting. We wouldn't expect a $25 or even a $1,000 contributor (there were three of them) to demand to review the copy before publication, nor would we expect Science News to comply. Science News isn't taking money out of the pockets of freelancers; this isn't a fixed pool of money, and any good pitch is likely to attract support, whether it comes from Science News or a hungry new science writer with the ink still wet on a master's degree.
We might worry about how editors will react. (It's always wise to worry about how editors will react.) Will editors at Science News or elsewhere look down at reporters petitioning for trips and thunder, "Fine, but go out and raise the money yourself!" Maybe. We'll see.
I have a vague sense of unease about this arrangement that I cannot explain. Maybe it's because it's a new idea and I'm a suspicious type; or maybe it's because there is something that's not quite right, and I haven't figured it out yet.
For now, we can make our judgment based on the quality of the stories. If Raloff writes good stuff, then this experiment was a success.
-Paul Raeburn
Leave a Reply